Why are Barnsley in the playoffs? (17 replies)

Interesting article in the pink’un on Saturday (The FT not the Sports Argus) on how Barnsley have reached the play-offs despite having the second lowest wage bill in the division and just staying up last year. They are owned by an American consortium who include Billy Beane of Moneyball fame.

The main ingredients of success according to the article are:

- Data analytics approach to all they do
- Almost always buy players under 24 whose values are likely to rise (they had the biggest percentage share of minutes played by under 23 players in the Championship this season)
- They rarely take on loan players so as to form a better team ethic
- They play the same tactics (high tempo high pressing game “gegenpressing”) irrespective of the manager they get in so they smoothly change managers as they had to this season
- They exploited the increase in useable substitutes from 3 to 5 to more frequently replace exhausted players during games and therefore maintain their energetic high tempo pressing more consistently throughout 90 minutes (their style is quite onerous on their front 3 players who were often substituted during the game to maintain the high tempo).

Interesting that of the Championship top 6 the two teams that weren’t recently in the Premier League were strong advocates of a data analytics approach. Shows that you can have success in this division without spending an absolute fortune with proper consistent planning and clever use of data. Is there any chance we could learn from this?